What's hot according to DLD 2012 delegates

The DLD conference in Munich (short for Digital Life Design)
brings together an A-list crowd of tech investors, startup founders
and creatives each January. Founded in 2005 by Marcel Reichart and
Steffi Czerny, for Germany's Burda media empire, it's a quality
event that last year I called "the hottest by-invitation ticket in Europe".

So when Wired was given an exclusive chance to learn what was on
DLD delegates' minds this season, we jumped at the chance. After
all, there's no better way to spot trends than to tap into the
wisdom of an event where speakers included Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg, AOL's Arianna Huffington, Twitter's Jack Dorsey and Airbnb's Brian Chesky.

Two weeks before this year's DLD, in the week beginning 5
January, the conference team partnered with SurveyMonkey to ask
delegates and speakers a range of questions on everything from Facebook's post-IPO prospects to trends
in digital advertising. A total of 351 people responded to the
questions, prompted by an emailed request. It was a pretty
international sample of influencers, 76.3% of them male and 23.7%
female: they came from 29 countries, the main ones Germany (29.1%),
the US (25.2%), the UK (10.5%) and Israel (10.5%), and others from
as far as Brazil and Kenya.

So which digital businesses are exciting them most? Jack
Dorsey's Square and social network Path, it seems. When asked about the
startups to watch in mobile, 10.5% said Square, Dorsey's
mobile-payments business; 6.2% said Path; and 5.2% chose check-in
service Foursquare. Foursquare was also the most-mentioned startup
in local, named by 12.1% of respondents, above car service Uber and
accommodation network Airbnb (both 5.9%). Square also proved the
most watched startup in e-commerce, nominated by 5.8% of
participants, above design retailer Fab (5.6%) and Amazon (5.1%).
Square's fast growth may explain why, when asked to identify "the
next Mark Zuckerberg", Jack Dorsey was the only person named.

In cloud computing, the top startup to watch was named as
Dropbox (15.4%), way ahead of Amazon
(8.6%) and Google (7.9%). You can
watch my DLD interview with Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston here.

So what else was on the delegates' minds? The most important
topics they will be following in 2012 are, in order: